One man’s struggle to stay positive when he was incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit.
Bozella suffered an extremely different childhood within the foster care system and turned to petty theft, but the murder for which he was convicted in 1983 forced him to spend 26 years behind bars. In this candid memoir, the author tells his painful side of the story: how he was accused and found guilty on scant proof and how he spent the next half of his life as a prisoner in Sing Sing and other jails. “Convicted murderer. There’s no way ever to take the sharp edge off those words or grow accustomed to their pain,” he writes. “Especially when they’re a lie, when you’re paying for another man’s crime, your whole life hijacked by people who turned their backs on the truth. That they did it so casually made it all the worse….I was a convenient scapegoat for an ambitious prosecutor and a bumbling police department.” Throughout, Bozella shares specific details that only someone who has spent time in jail would know—e.g., the code of conduct inmates must follow if they want to avoid being attacked by a fellow prisoner; the underground commerce in drugs, food, clothes, and sex and how a pack of cigarettes often takes the place of cash; and the endless hours that need to be filled, which Bozella used to learn foreign languages, certificates in a variety of subjects, and his master’s degree. Throughout his ordeal, the author stayed surprisingly positive and used his instincts as a boxer to help him make the necessary changes in his attitude toward life. When he was finally exonerated, he was able to forgive those who had sent him to prison. “Telling people my story,” he writes, “is the best way I’ve found to turn bitterness into hope.”
A harrowing and inspiring account of fighting a nearly lifelong battle against injustice.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-220815-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SPORTS & RECREATION
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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